Cambridge bans trans rowers from women’s boat race

[lcakethereforeIam]

I suspect the headline is inaccurate, probably for brevity. A woman who claims some flavour of trans-identity would be able to row as long as she wasn't doping

https://archive.ph/xYGkG

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/08/cambridge-bans-trans-rowers-from-womens-boat-race/

As you can imagine as soon as this sank in with the local tras it didn't go down well.

I agree completely. I used to cox the men's 1st VIII at my college and occasionally men's IVs but I would also occasionally help out with the women's blue boat trials when they needed more coxes than were interested in trialling. The men in my crews were decent athletes, a couple rowed for Goldie/LWs/Blue boat but most were just decent college-level rowers. The women in the trial boats were top level female athletes, with great technique close to the peak of their game (obviously those who were selected went on to be even more so). But yes, the difference in power, and speed was palpable. The speed in the water, the ease with which boats were lifted out, the length of stroke. Everything.

I agree too with @PermanentTemporary 's point about it not always feeling like a totally single-sex sport given that there are often different-sex coxes in the crews. That may make it easier for those who want to break down barriers to do so. But our function was different. We were there for our intellectual input and our ability to judge angles.

Saddened to learn about the 2015 crew. Not acceptable at all.

Very relieved to see common sense prevailing - albeit by a disgracefully narrow margin.

@GCburneraccount Well you say “should be easy to deal with” but is it really, for a bunch of students trying to run a big head race like Fairbairns? Even three people in a dinghy in the middle of the river around a blind corner could cause carnage, and I am not sure what the race organisers can do about it in the moment, apart from cancelling the race.

@AlexandraLeaving I was told that the minutes from the captains’ meeting would be posted up on the CUCBC website by now but tellingly they haven’t been…

Good. Those who have gone through XY puberty can compete against other rowers who have gone through XY puberty.

I played a competitive sport until I was 19 and for fun, we would mess around with the blokes. Even though I was on the top womens’ team, the blokes on the lower mens’ team would run circles around me; I never stood a chance.

Didn't Osiris beat Blondie by 15 lengths that year? So they weren't a very effective cheat.....

I guess I mean that a small protest like that would be on the same level as other incidents like 'cow falls in river'*, 'altercation with other boater', 'crew capsizes' which are infrequent but stuff similar to that happens every few years and are dealt with by marshalls and organisers.

If there was credible threat of a much bigger protest that would be different. Better hope the weather is rubbish - like usual!

*this happened. cant remember how we eventually got it out but it took a while 😆

Why doesn't the men's team automatically allocate a space to a transwoman for inclusivity purposes?

They could have done that for transmen years ago if they were committed to the idea that transwomen are woman (and by default transmen are men - except they don't actually believe that when it comes to it).

Thinking again, I wonder if this happening relatively early in 2015 may have meant CUW learnt a lesson early and in the years afterwards as this became more prevalent were able to quietly discourage similar from happening?

All speculation on my part, I'm going to have to find someone from that era to have a discrete chat with and satisfy my curiosity. Perhaps I'd better start accepting some of those alumni invites...

I was thinking his male strength and stroke length might be a handicap being too disparate from the rest of the team. I think I've clearly established though that I know bog all about rowing, I'm more of a paddler.

Many factors involved in an VIII, likely they were just a weaker crew. I seem to remember Oxford women being quicker to embrace similar recruiting tactics to the men in the earlier years of being televised.

But whether you are an effective cheat or not, a cheat is a cheat. Lose your integrity, you always lose. Even if the rules permitted self ID then, for me that would not be in the spirit of this private rivalry.

Agreed. It's been very depressing seeing so many handmaidens on both of those sites, more than happy to prioritise male feelings. There were definitely males in women's boats at last year's Bumps but hopefully they won't be there this year (tho DS isn't rowing this year so I won't get to watch)!

Isn't it rowing that has a rule that TW could row in women's teams, but that mixed 4s had to be 2 men and 2 biological real women?

tbh i think that any sport that allows TW to be in women's teams needs a 100% TW team to enter. The more the merrier so that eventually there are no women anywhere near it.
Then we set up our own sports again. (not really but the sight of 8 teams of men where there should be 8 teams of women might wake some of the "be kind" wankers up)

Nope. Men aren't stronger than women just because they are bigger.

I'm 7" shorter than DH and can see how it would be easy to think it's scale that make men stronger but I'm 5'10 and my last year of uni and a few years after boyfriend was the same height as me. We were the same age give or take a few months, roughly the same weight and were similar levels of fitness (both played a team run around a field sport once a week plus one training session for that and a couple of gym trips) so the only variable between us was sex. He was much stronger than me. Male and female bodies are different in lots of ways that add up to a massive male strength/speed advantage even when the man is the same size as a woman.

Smaller women deserve fair sport too.

whilst I agree with pretty much all of that (I just checked the weightlifting world records for max 60kg bodyweight men vs women in the same weight category (63kg is the closest), the men's record is over 20% higher) but I more or less jokingly made the suggestion almost to deliberately expose the difference between men & women - I bet if you did that you'd get loads of men moaning that a 59kg limit was somehow discriminatory because, yknow, men and women have different bodies.

Hey @Brefugee , unless there have been more recent changes I don't know about, the mixed rules are paralympic rowing specific. Mixed rowing doesn't really exist in able bodied competition (apart from the odd 'fun' event).

There are various para categories for visually/physically/intellectually impaired athletes. I think mixed categories came about to try and create more opportunities for meaningful participation and competition in a sport that has relatively few people doing it.

Gender ideology confusion did make this all a dogs breakfast for a while, but World Rowing and British Rowing have now sorted this out for their own events. Para events have generally been a bit slower to sort this out, but I think in this case the governing bodies are the same.

I think the mixed rowing was in the US, where at the time twaw except when it might inconvenience the other men.

The difference is that unlike the other examples, this is/was very deliberate and planned disruption - they don’t want to be fished out, pulled into bank, helped off the water etc, they want to cause maximum strife.